This talk will report the results of a
parallel acceptability rating experiment concerning superiority violations
("he wonders what who has proposed") carried out in seven languages (Czech,
Dutch, English, German, Icelandic, Spanish, Swedish), and two further
smaller experiments. The results show that

a. there is no or only a very small effect of placing a wh-object in front
of a wh-subject in languages in which there is overt case marking
(CZ,D,E,IS) irrespective of whether that property implies general free
constituent order or not (as in Icelandic). In other words, a superiority
effect shows up in those languages only in which grammatical functions are
exclusively identified by position, which is in line with a large processing
contribution to the superiority effect (in a crosslinguistic perspective).Â

b. In Dutch and Swedish, the superiority effect is modulated by the animacy
of the object, as one would expect if a major processing component is
involved in the phenomenon. In Dutch and Swedish, violating examples can be
found in corpora. In English, there is no effect of animacy on the strength
of the superiority effect, and corresponding examples do not show up in the
WWW. Therefore, the superiority effect seems to be grammatically triggered
in English only. The most likely interpretation is a strong ban against in
situ wh-subjects.Â

c. We can show that there is a residual superiority effect caused by the
crossing nature of a movement step in English but not in German. In German,
there is no penalty for crossing movement even in the case of extraction
from a finite complement clause crossing a matrix subject.